A delicious winter salad

I made a delicious winter salad today, according to the rules of 'real cooking' as set out in an earlier blog. The rules of 'real cooking' that most good cooks instinctively follow is that you use what you have to hand. Today, the ingredients for a stupendously successful salad made, as it were, out of my head were as follows:

A squash roasted in the oven
A bag of kale, steamed
Carrots, part boiled then roasted
A large Spanish onion
4 or five cloves of garlic
Cooked beetroot
Breaded ham (four slices, cut into smaller bits)
Some cold boiled salad potatoes, the sort that do not fall to bits when you boil them
Freshly-ground black pepper.

Method: The amount of each ingredient is to your own particular taste. Note: everything I put in the salad was already cooked, except the onion and garlic.

Fry the chopped onion and the garlic until soft.
Slice or chop all other ingredients into bite-size pieces
Combine all in a large dish.  It is important that the onion and garlic are warm from the frying pan, and covered in plenty of oil to make the salad really delicious.

Season with freshly-ground black pepper to taste.

Serve and eat.

Incredibly delicious winter salad

There is plenty of squash left for (eg) a savoury risotto tonight. Also, the ham was bought last Saturday marked down because the packet said 'best by Jan 5'. The whole point of ham is that it is preserved meat, so I was quite happy to put it in my salad today (Fri Jan 11).